Environmental Positivity

There is still hope. Doxion - late 20s - genderfluid - she/they - white

[there-is-a-way-forward]

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Hello! Welcome to my blog. This is a blog centering around environmentalism and, in particular, trying to stay positive and hopeful in a world that tries to bring us down.

This used to be a veganism blog. While I still support veganism I do not expect everyone to go fully vegan.

About the blog:

This is a blog centering around envronmentalism. I will be posting things such as personal achievements, positive news stories, select petitions and campaigns to support, and small ways you can help the environment. The blog aims to nurture hope in a world that often inspires despair. The blog also features intersectionalism, and supports LGBTQ+ folk, bipoc, women, and disabled people. I hope that this blog can inspire some people for positive change, as well as helping people's mental health regarding the environment.

About me:

Hi! I'm Doxion, you can call me Doxi or Dox for short (the name comes from the word Paradox!). I'm a genderfluid woman in my late 20s and my pronouns are she/they. I've been enthusiastic about environmentalism since i was 13, and in 2025 ive started to get back into it. I like reading about stories of the past present and future of our planet.

Check out the Discord server!

[profeminist]

"Stop worrying about whether Black women know you’re a safe white woman to be around, and start making sure white women know you’re not a safe person to be racist around."

Source: https://www.threads.net/@asuiterclarke/post/DCFdDw8Ta4D

[there-is-a-way-forward]

This is a good book on race issues I recommend. I haven’t got far through it yet, but I trust it from what I’ve read so far. Note that it focuses on racism in the USA, but I think the base concepts apply to other countries too.

[there-is-a-way-forward]

Quote from the book “Who Cares Wins” by Lily Cole, on the topic of organic farming:

“[…] can organic farming methods meet our existing and growing needs for food? The answer seems to be yes, though there’s a caveat. According to a study in Nature, organic farming could provide enough food to feed the predicted population of 9.6 billion people in 2050 without expanding the area of farmland currently used - i.e. whilst preserving what little wild land we have left - but only if people lower their meat consumption.

[there-is-a-way-forward]

[elminx]

I’ve noticed some posts around about how you can’t romanticize your life during a fascist regime and while I deeply sympathize with this sentiment, I want you to try to understand that’s what they want you to believe.

Fascism thrives best in the cesspool of hopelessness. They want us so confused and hopeless that we give in. When you give in, you don’t fight back.

If you wait for life to look good to do the things that bring you joy; life will still be bad - you will just have less joy.

As someone who has struggled with my mental health a lot for the last thirty years, I know this struggle firsthand. And changing this belief system - the one where you spend all of your time expecting bad things so you won’t be surprised when they happen - it’s the hardest work that I have ever done. And I’m not perfect; I still have setbacks. I still experience really real fears about the state of the world and the US, in particular, because that’s where I live.

But I made a vow to myself that I will not let the choices of others ruin my life. When I made that vow, I was thinking of my parents - but it applies to the state of the government right now, too.

There are still flowers in my garden, and ripe tomatoes, and it’s almost pick-your-own apples season, and I have plans with my friends to go to as many cemetery ghost walks as we can find this October.

I still deserve to live. I still deserve to laugh. I still deserve to love. I still deserve to be as happy as I can be.

And you do, too.

[yeahawvampire]

Dan Savage.

[anarchistmemedistro]

*gestures broadly at the resistance movements in europe during the last reich*

[anarchistmemedistro]

[m0tel6mxzzy]

“Where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”

— The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

“One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”

— The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

[there-is-a-way-forward]

Been reading about cutting out meat vs switching to grass fed, pasture rotated meat, and which is better for them environment. According to “Who Cares Wins” by Lily Cole, there was a report published by the University of Oxford’s Food Climate Research Network, which says grass fed meat is not a solution, and that though there is some locally specific evidence of carbon sequestration of grass-fed animals, that effect is time limited, reversible, and outweighed by other greenhouse gases generated. “Ultimately, if high-consuming individuals and countries want to do something positive for the climate, maintaining their current consumption levels but simply switching to grass-fed beef is not a solution. Eating less meat, of all types, is.”

[geopsych]

Snowdrops in the garden. I thought the whole patch was damaged by some work on the foundation last fall but it looks like a few have come through!

[catholicapothecary]

[justalittlesolarpunk]

This is the foundation of all hope btw. In the words of Tolkien, 'despair is for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.'

[there-is-a-way-forward]

My Top Tips for Going Vegan:

1. Take it at your own pace. I think one misperception people have sometimes is that they’ve got to go vegan all at once, but that’s nowhere near the case. Take as long as you need - it took me 2 years to go fully vegan!

2. Start easy. Start by switching out things that are easier, that you don’t care so much about, and work your way up to switching out the more difficult things, that maybe you rely on more. For example I started by cutting out things like toast with butter and croissants, things u had sometimes but weren’t staples. The hardest thing for me was pizza, so I switched that out last (and was the reason I took 2 years lol)

3. Focus on replacing rather than replicating. What I mean by this is, instead of focusing purely on finding vegan versions of foods (vegan burgers, vegan cheese, etc), focus instead on finding something that satisfies the same desires as the original food. E.g. with my pizza-quest, at the time I was going vegan I couldn’t find any good vegan pizzas... but what got me to quit non-vegan pizzas in the end was pasta+tomato sauce - starchy, tomatoey, warm and filling, it satisfied essentially the same things I was eating pizzas for.

4. Explore. Try things you’ve never thought to try before. Try things just because they’re vegan. Try things that you’ve already tried and didn’t like before to see if you’ve changed you’re mind. In order to keep your diet varied, it’s important to try new things. You don’t have to keep anything you hate, obviously, but exploring different foods will help you find new favourites (very important!), more varied nutrition, and possibly better prices long-term. Not to mention having a variety of foods to eat is better for your mental health than just eating the same things over and over.

Those are my top tips. If anyone else has tips they’d like to add, feel free! c:

[there-is-a-way-forward]

I’m currently reading about how bad meat/animal agriculture is for the environment - the book I’m reading says it’s either the first or second biggest issue - so I thought I would reblog this again just to give people an idea of how to make going vegan (or cutting down your meat intake at all) easier.

[theinternetarchive]

print disabled access and the internet archive

to access books on the IA that have lost public rights (aka most of them) all you need to do is this:

Request to Verify Eligibility for Free Ebooks for the Print Disabled

Do you have a disability that interferes with reading printed text? Please fill out this form to get qualified for our program for print-dis

fill out this self-reporting form, where it asks if you have a disability and are thus eligible for print disabled access.

what this form asks is if you have ever had accommodations during schooling, if you are mentally ill, have a physical disability, etc. and you submit it and in a few days you get access.

they do not ask for any sort of documentation or information, just say 'i'm disabled'...they want to give it to you.

[theinternetarchive]

This isn’t stealing disabled resources or whatever btw. It’s a loophole they came up with after a lawsuit a few years back that said books couldn’t be publicly available to everyone (for copyright reasons). They want you to exploit this system because they wanted things to be free in the first place. The only downside is you can’t download pdfs directly and to download the epub you need conversion software. The in browser reader is really manageable tho ! Especially with an archive.org account where you can bookmark/list/favorite.

[thegaylibertarian]

[liminalweirdo]

I am once again begging you to get your hands on physical media and/or save your fave stuff OFFLINE.

[todaysbird]

the african sacred ibis, often known colloquially as the sacred ibis, is a wading bird found in africa along with portions of iraq, iran and kuwait. their name comes from their importance in ancient egyptian religion; they were believed to be the earthly version of the god thoth, and sacred ibises were frequently mummified as offerings - it’s believed that over eight million total ibises were mummified. a snail, one of the main staples of the ibises’ diet, was often placed in the bill of mummified birds. unfortunately, they are currently extirpated from egypt, although they still maintain large population sizes elsewhere. african sacred ibises are striking and easily recognizable, with almost entirely white plumage (apart from black wingtips and some black plumage on the rump); they also have bald heads and long, curved bills. males are slightly larger than females on average, but plumage doesn’t differ between sexes. unlike many closely related ibis species, the african sacred ibis is typically quiet, though they make puppy-like yelping sounds on occasion. their diet largely consists of aquatic prey such as mollusks, insects, crustaceans, and anything else that enters their path - fish, reptiles, small mammals and even carrion. they’ve also been observed feeding on eggs, both of crocodiles and of other birds. feeding often takes place in large, social flocks, and ibises are known for joining mixed-species colonies to feed peacefully in a group. the african sacred ibis is estimated to have a population size of 200,000–450,000 birds, with numbers decreasing in recent years.

[there-is-a-way-forward]

Reading this book on environmentalism , it talks a bit about the creator of Impossible Foods. It says he was a biomedical researcher at Stanford University, and he was looking for the “most important” issue to help find a solution for, and he settled on the meat industry

It quotes him saying, “I realised that, by a whopping margin, the catastrophic environmental impact of animals as a food technology was like number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 on that list”

I knew before that animal ag had a large impact on the environment, but I didn’t realise it was quite *that* much compared to other sectors

[preserving-tiktok]

[directactionforhope]

aeroleaf hybrid's tree-shaped wind turbine includes solar panels for dual energy production

 

-via Design Bloom, November 24, 2023. Very cool! Some excellent info on exactly why these will be so useful in the comments.

[there-is-a-way-forward]

If I can recommend a book for people to read, I’d like to recommend OCEAN by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield. This book is full of amazing information about the ocean, but also about the ways ocean environments have been affected by environmental change. However, the book also consistently demonstrates how ocean environments have an amazing ability to recover if we simply let them. I find it a highly motivational hope-inspiring read.

[wachinyeya]

100 Miles of Derelict Fencing Removed by Rewilders Across the Great Plains in Montana https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/100-miles-of-derelict-fencing-removed-by-rewilders-across-the-great-plains-in-montana/

100 Miles of Derelict Fencing Removed by Rewilders Across the Great Plains in Montana

All rolled up, the barrier amounted to 500,000 pounds of scrap metal, and with its removal, the prairie's megafauna are free to move about